Not sure if this is a good place for this post or not, but here goes.

I reject outbound connections to meta domains at the firewall. I noticed this banking app refuses to prompt for login credentials unless I am on mobile or a public WiFi network. I watched my FW logs and noticed many rejected connections to graph[.]facebook[.]com.

I contacted their support team, but they denied the connection was their app. I shared the screenshot on this post and they closed my case without comment.

I emailed the address on the Google play store and they also denied the connection was their app. I shared the screenshot and they asked if I downloaded the app from the play store, implying the official app doesn't do this, but of course it does.They closed my case without proper resolution as well.

Just thought I'd share this here so people know that some banks make direct connections to Facebook to share analytics, without your knowledge or informed consent, and they lie about it when called on it.

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[–] 166 points 3 years ago (24 children)

It’s probably NTP a lot of banking apps have extra protections and if it can’t determine the time from its own trusted authority it may not allow the connection.

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  • [–] 104 points 3 years ago* (5 children)

    Launchdarkly is likely a culprit as well. Just doing a background search reveals that the service allows dev teams to do A/B testing, enable new features without releasing a new version, and various other "dynamic" functions.

    OP is on the wrong side of Occam's razor

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  • [–] 30 points 3 years ago* (4 children)

    This is definitely probably it. I can't believe more things aren't broken by blocking launchdarkly

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  • [–] 14 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    If you set it up correctly it defaults to a specific flag state if it can’t connect. I.e. always show the user the old treatment instead of the new if you can request the actual state of their enrollment.

    They get blocked constantly and my old company just routed the requests through our domain so they’d stop getting blocked

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  • [–] 22 points 3 years ago (12 children)

    how would that explain connection to facebook?

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  • [–] 49 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    It is not only Facebook that is been block if you take the time to read the log you will see the NTP connection is being block too.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    The app in the screenshot is just capturing packets. The list shown are connections made during the capture and closed just means the connection is not currently active.

    That said, I downloaded Ally, ran that same packet capture but never saw anything sent to Facebook. I got to the login screen just fine.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago (5 children)

    Is it normal that a bank app tries to connect to meta?

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  • [–] 25 points 3 years ago* (4 children)

    Meta provides a lot of other backend B2B services beyond just Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.

    You think that's the only way they have of scarfing down data? Absolutely not, they make other useful tools as well that businesses can use, because if they can't get their info directly from you, they can get it from the people you have to regularly interact with instead.

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  • [–] 8 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    This is gross… but also not something I’ve really thought about.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    The implication is that OP’s assessment is incorrect and the blocked requests to launchdarkly are what’s preventing them from logging in. The Facebook requests don’t show a source so they could be from another device.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (4 children)

    When I unblock the Facebook address, the app opens as expected.

    I'm not blocking any NTP. My home servers rely on it (just TrueNAS checks time every 3 minutes...), but I do block DNS outbound to force using my own DNS.

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  • [+] 15 points 3 years ago* (last edited 3 years ago) (2 children)
  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I'm going to assume that hopefully OP knows how DNS works and meant he blocks all outbound DNS requests from his devices and sets a specific DNS for his external queries from his FW/Router. I do the same thing.

    However, he is blocking NTP right there so who knows.

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